If any Firefox devs or PMs are reading, PLEASE build even a simple tab grouper into the browser natively.

Regardless how recommended a given extension is, all tab manager extensions require access to all web content which is too much. I’d rather use something built in but barebones rather than an addon

I settled down on SideBerry after having used Tree Tab Style for ages: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

It adds contexts/categories. So you can have trees of tabs per topic.

I've settled on AllTabsHelper https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/all-tabs-help...

Not as full featured as some of the others but does what I need.

I wish any of the tab managers would allow me to sort by domain, as it is I've installed a second add on just to do this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/order-tabs-by...

I don't want to piss on the OP effort, some people will find it useful.

For me, I don't understand the problem. Why do so many people need a tab manager in say Firefox, but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?

Could you please also add a button to sort the tabs by domain? I don't want hierarchical grouping like some competing extensions offer (to me such UX feels like additional complexity), only sorting.

By the way, does anyone happen to know how to overcome the sidebar width limit in the current Firefox versions? I want the tab titles to be less truncated but Firefox won't let me expand the sidebar more than 432 px in width.

An alternative (maybe even better) idea which came into my mind is make item title display multi-line (word-wrap). Is there a Grasshopper configuration option for this? I already enabled URL display so it already is two-line effectively but I feel like probably making both parts (the title and the URL) two-line each.

This reminds me of a sabbatical project i ran with during the pandemic. ended up sputtering out due to lack of time and motivation, but i did end up pushing out an initial alpha for some friends

https://elos-edu.notion.site/eLOS-Connect-0-0-11-a72acbec893...

Still trying to clean up the code enough to release out into the open.

Is this manager advanced enough to replicate Vivaldi's tab tiling and stacking functionality?

(also not sure why the screenshots devote 80% of space to non-addon functionality like page with some distracting chip images and colored tables)

Given the required permissions I’d like to read the source code before using it, but that doesn’t seem to be available. Is this correct?

  $ file grasshopper_urls-746.xpi 
  grasshopper_urls-746.xpi: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract, compression method=deflate

Is there anything that OP can say to sell this to someone heavily invested in Sideberry (an excellent piece of software imo)?

Can it be configured to mimic native look&feel or at least use a light theme?

Sidebery is wonderful, but the real gem is Tab Stash. Lets me organize tabs into topic-related groups, with the added bonus that not all of these are "living" tabs. Some are archived/hibernated. By default, live tabs are in an unorganized/unnamed group. The only issue I had was I couldn't tell which tab was playing audio. Tab Stash doesn't have indicators for this, so I installed the Sound Control extension to list tabs playing audio and switch to them.

I got: vertical tabs, tab grouping by topic/label, tab archival (low memory use)

I am a huge fan of Sidebery, but it really highlights how messed up Mozilla is. Not only have they failed to provide a native vertical tab solution, but then you go to turn off the damn horizontal ones and you have to jump through convoluted hoops by enabling the userChrome.css and then figuring out where the hell to put the file and all of this for one edit. Yeah sure, I have figured it out (and have to re figure every time I install FF), but there is no way that I could ever tell a random user to switch to vertical. I cannot fathom how Mozilla could not add a checkbox to their anemic settings menu.

In grasshopper you can filter by domain, but also can add tags, and colors, to any tab, and filter through this. There's a profile editor accessible when you right click the items.

Why not use the bookmark sidebar?

Is there an authoritative way hiding the horizontal tab with SideBerry?

> Why do so many people need a tab manager in say Firefox, but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander

I guess you could call me a "tab hoarder", I commonly have 50+ tabs open for the various topics and contexts I'm browsing and switching between. I usually also always restore my previous session from the day before, so some of the tabs are 2 weeks old but I have yet to finish the thing they're related to, so they stay up.

Compared to other applications that I close/open without restoring the previous context. I guess the terminal/tmux is the one that has the most context, and there I usually have 5-10 tabs open at any given time, for the same reason as above. And then I do use a manager of sorts (tmux), but for all the rest, I'm just opening/closing things as needed.

For myself at least vertical tabs can be easily grouped to visually show task or subject. If I’m doing ticket work for example,each ticket gets a main tab with their related child tabs indented underneath. I’ve even written a small web app that creates custom tab titles which I use for organizing tabs.

Lack of vertical tabs is why I don’t use Chrome.

I think it's largely a solution for bad UI, both in the web and in the browser.

I have a window open just with YouTube tabs of videos that interest me and that I intend to watch in the near future. As an OS-level window, it has weight and presence. Inside the window I have vertical and nested tabs. So I have videos grouped by topic or just by the rabbit hole I used. I can collapse them, move them around, etc. It's tactile. If I put all those videos into a YouTube playlist, it becomes static. It's a link in a list. It becomes less convenient and natural to add things to the list or even interact with them. There's no nesting, no grouping. Have you tried working with a YouTube playlist? It's abysmal. I'd rather keep them in a more concrete state as a tab which is integrated into my browser's tabs system (or whatever extension I use for it, in this case Sidebery) as part of a window that's a natural part of my OS.

This is all before considering how incredibly bad and basic Chrome and Firefox's history tabs are, which we also end up replacing with hundreds of tabs. I wish I had a vim-like undotree or anything like it to navigate my past tabs. There's a whole spatial component that's missing, whole dimensions missing, and I've never understood why.

You don't manage your Word documents in Word. You use the OS for that. That's pretty much why nobody needs tabs in Word.

> but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?

Because they rarely open so many tabs there? I routinely open dozens of tabs in web browsers as I navigate to other pages wanting to keep the previous while I explore the web (I hardly ever left-click links - I almost always wheel-click) but I rarely ever open more than 6 folders in Total Commander or more than 6 documents in an Office.

As a developer here is a scenario:

Start day on task A. Open Task, Open Subtask, Open git PR to check comments, Open Azure portal to check something, check Kibana Logs. Do a seperate second Kibana query.

Get asked about task B

Open Task, Open OneNote docs on that task, open a chatgpt session for that task

This is a mild example

Why not close tabs as they are used? Because if I need them again the load time of many sites is atrocious and then I also need to remember how I got there. I would need to save my kibana query or make a note of how I got to that Azure blade. Neither of these update the URL to capture the state (they are not HATEOAS) or I donn’t trust them to.

It should be implemented on os-system level, so you can access the content, no matter with which app.

People use all their cloud services via Firefox, not so much via Word.

Also, you may be writing one document but have a hundred tabs open for research.

> but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?

How do you know? Those apps have no way to customize on the same level that Firefox allows. But they also have their ways to handle masses of documents and windows, they are just not very good.

What's so hard about understanding that easily accessible groups of documents is a useful concept in organizing your digital life?

And why do you think they don't? I'd love to have a consistently great tab management experience in all the apps that have tabs (and all the apps that don't). It's just they are more closed, so it's harder to do that with some extension

And it's a bigger issue for the browser since you'd usually have more pages opened there

i refuse to believe this is a real question